New technologies in ship design will deliver economic benefits if energy efficiency is taken into account. With an optimized hull, substantial savings in fuel can be achieved together with corresponding reductions in the emission of CO2, SO2 und NOx. Now, the software company Friendship Systems, a member of the GL Group, has released an upgrade of its simulation-driven design software Friendship-Framework. Release 2.0 of the Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) software system provides enhanced functionality and further operational refinement for convenient, time-saving and better engineering of energy-efficient ship hulls, propellers, turbines, pumps and other units.
Improvements have been made in tool integration, feature modeling and visualization technology. Coupling external programs and in-house codes are facilitated through XML, generic and COM interfaces. The developments in feature technology comprise the automated generation of feature definitions from the base model, their nesting into feature assemblies and the application of curve engines and meta surfaces in feature definitions.
The Friendship-Framework 2.0 now includes a skybox with scalable wave patterns for photo realistic visualization of the designed geometry, clipping cubes and dimensioning modes. Additional assets available with the new release are a library of components, i.e., base models of frequently employed surfaces, curvature visualization for the hands-on quality assessment of curves and surfaces, GUI features, automated PDF diagram creation from design results, comprehensive integrated documentation and improved project management.
Friendship Systems offers ship owners and shipyards a range of modules and plug-ins for optimizing the design process. Their software development activities facilitate parametric design procedures and aim at a holistic approach involving the systematic testing and assessment of a large set of design variants. Geometric modeling procedures are coupled with hydrostatic und hydrodynamic analysis, and then used for the detailed assessment of a hull design. Finally, the ideal customer-specific parameters of the ship are determined from many thousands of virtual ships .